Those two little toothlets are definitely turning out to be teeth. It's not easy to get her to let us take a look at them, but every once in a while we catch a glimpse: toothlings they are!

Sawyer's been having oodles of fun crawling and exploring all over the not-particularly-baby-proofed apartment. She's getting to be quite talented at standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down and . . . you get the picture. She also seems to be starting to understand instructions. If I say "stand up," she stands up. If I say "dive!" she lifts her hands from the sofa, turns sideways, and dives into my arms. (Which is seriously cute.)

Right now she's racing all over the apartment in her diaper blowing raspberries and swinging around one of my necklaces. She's very good about playing by herself -- she doesn't seem to need someone hovering over her all the time. We just keep the doors to the bathrooms and our bedroom shut, and she runs around her room, the dining room, the hallway, and the living room.

She's got enough hair that I tried putting in a little barrette yesterday -- not that she needs one, but the hair can actually support one. But it doesn't look like her. She's just not a barrette kind of girl, I guess!



Don't you think?

For those of you who are attuned to such things, you may have noticed a lack of discussion here in Sawyer's World of anything vaguely resembling the subject of teeth. There's a good reason for this. We have no teeth.

We're not concerned -- there's no congenital tendency toward lifelong toothlessness on either the Ziev or Niehaus side. However, we have found the ongoing state of no-teeth to be a curious thing, given that Paul apparently got two teeth when he was five months old. Although I held out until 8 1/2 months, Sawyer is now at 9 1/2 months and counting. (We peruse Paul's and my baby books for the details of our own babyhoods -- neither Bubbie nor Grandma Marlo can spout this data off the top of their heads.)

But now, there's news. Today, we spotted two little white thingies resting in Sawyer's lower gums -- thingies that would seem to be the little prongs of freshly minted teeth! Very exciting stuff. Ultimately, I think we'll miss her toothless grin more than we'll discover any usefulness of the two little toothlings.

The food situation is improving once again. Tonight, she went to town on a container of yogurt:

More Food Adventures

We're back to "NO" on the food front, but we just had an interesting discovery.

Sawyer flatly rejected the yummy pears I had prepared for her, as well as the sweet potatoes and chicken, but happily accepted and sucked on the teething biscuit I handed her to chomp on while I prepared to toss a handful of cheerios into her tray. So I took back the biscuit, dipped it into the pears, and handed her a pear-coated biscuit. Lo and behold, she sucked the pears right off the biscuit without complaint. She ended up polishing off both the pears and the chicken/sweet potato combo, using the biscuit instead of a spoon. Go figure. We seem to have a spoon aversion going on today rather than a baby food aversion. I guarantee that this will not be a permanent solution, but it did get us through lunch!

She's also gotten really good at eating a cheerio while spitting out whatever other food I have secretly attached to the cheerio. (Today it was bits of banana.) Quite a nimble little mouth.

The food situation is improving! During Bubbie's visit this week, she did a nice job of reminding Sawyer that she does in fact like food. Sawyer even tried something brand new this morning: some Yo Baby yogurt. Go team!

The weather on Tuesday having broken freezing for the first time in ages, Mommy and Sawyer managed to make it to the playground. Sawyer's swinging skills are much improved -- she's realized that she can hang on to the swing and stabilize herself.



(I know -- the ears are pretty darned cute.)

Now that Susan is on the world's longest nanny vacation, we are settled into our schedule of oodles of caregivers. I was on for Monday-Wednesday; Wednesday-Friday were a combination of Bubbie, Popsie, and Aunt Carly, and we now have Grandma Marlo and Grandpa Bob visiting for the weekend, after which Grandma Marlo will do a couple weeks of Sawyer-bonding. It's a shame that no one wants to hang out with Sawyer!

Dining Update

We are still pretty heavily weighted toward the Cheerios around here. I did manage to get about half a jar of apples and apricots into her for breakfast, primarily by scrunching a plastic bag and waving it around her face while she was eating. If today is anything like yesterday, that bit of fruit for breakfast will be it for non-Cheerio sustenance today. I'm chalking the whole thing up to a Phase, and have decided not to sweat it. Let them eat Cheerios!

Meanwhile, the scanner that Paul got me for Festive Winter Holiday is now up and running. Theoretically, the grand project is to digitize all the photos of my childhood for posterity. For those of you who have spent any meaningful amount of time at my parents' house, you should realize that this is something of a pipe dream. Just in the three years before my sister was born, the cabinet housing the photo albums contained Kimberly Volumes 1-23. (Like father, like daughter, says she who is up to photo #3263. I can't imagine how many pictures there would have been if digital cameras had existed in the early 70s.) The massiveness of the project notwithstanding, I'm pretty excited about it.

So, now that the scanner is operative, here's something interesting:



The baby in the center looks familiar, no? Except that it's not Sawyer -- it's my sister, Carly, around the same age that Sawyer is now. (That's me on the right in the yellow shirt -- the others are my cousins and grandfather, circa 1975.)

Back to the real deal: as I indicated on the growth chart, it's getting increasingly difficult to take a "formal" portrait of Sawyer in the green glider. Here's the latest attempt:

Nothing but Cheerios

Up until two days ago, Sawyer was perfectly happy to eat anything so long as it was Stage II baby food or Cheerios. The content of the baby food was irrelevant, just as long as it was heavily pureed to the consistency of, well, baby food.

Now, we've been told to start adding more texture to her diet, so that she can get used to eating real food. No problem, right? She already snarfs Cheerios like they're going out of style. By the handful. Texture should be no problem.

Ha.

You put the littlest bit of Stage III food (same as Stage II, just slightly less well pureed) into her mouth, and she makes a horrible gagging face like you had just stuck a tongue depressor all the way down her throat. And to improve the situation, she's now morally opposed to any baby food, regardless of the degree of pureedness. If it's on a spoon, she's not interested, because -- God forbid -- it might have lumps.

Which brings us back to Cheerios, which are now the only thing she's interested in eating. She talks to the Cheerios, she sings to the Cheerios, she munches and crunches the Cheerios by the fistful. I tried cutting up a soft banana into little Cheerio-sized morsels yesterday -- nothing doing. It's Cheerios or bust.

(And why isn't it spelled Cheerioes, just out of curiosity?)

She flies through the air with the greatest of ease

And now, for our next trick: the dive!

Sawyer stands leaning against the sofa or her learning table or her other learning table type thing or the magazine rack, happily hanging out and enjoying all 27ish inches of her vast height. Then she turns 90 degrees to face me (or Paul, or Susan, or whomever), lifts her arms in the air, gets this huge wide-mouthed look of excitement on her face, and takes a total header of a dive into my waiting arms! She does a lot of cute things, but this one is beyond cute. Fast forward 10 years or so, and I know exactly what this kid is going to look like on a roller coaster.

Of course, it's inevitable that she's going to try to do this sometime when no one is there to catch her, and she's going to smush her face on the floor. Thus far that hasn't happened. She only seems inclined to dive when there's a good catcher sitting next to her. She doesn't, however, care whether you're paying attention to her. Yesterday she dove onto my leg while I was looking at something else.

Oops.

On the other hand . . .

But then there are pictures like this. (Click on photo for closeup of kissable little face!)



Off now for Sawyer to watch her first round of Super Bowl commercials!